I think the interesting thing I've noticed over the (thankfully) limited experience I have with dealing with death is how different it is every single time. Now that the clinical introspection is out of the way, the content:

With my Nana, so far the mourning has been in the form of introspective reflection punctuating a sort of grief-fueled creative productivity (...In the form of an GURPS campaign I set I'd organise some months back starting to materialize before my player's eyes)

...Until today. The grief fueled creative productivity still seems to be going strong (...Although more obviously grief fueled right now. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with the result of that, but I sure as heck aren't just going to let it sit on my harddrive), but I went to see Beauty and the Beast with my mother. Why was I doing that six days after my nana's (on my mother's side) death and three days before her funeral? Well, my mother was going to take her there her to see it for her birthday, I had expressed interest but hadn't gotten round to getting the tickets, due to knowing the girl that's playing Belle in this production from childhood, and, well, my Nana would never have forgiven us if the tickets had gone to waste.

...It was... A powerful experience. A painful one, but a good sort of pain. The production was also good, and the girl playing Belle fantastic, but that's irrelevant to the power of the experience in this case.

Just a quick FYI - Dreamwidth is now in open beta, and I have a few invite codes, so if you want them, comment.

Comments are screened so that if you don't think I know you're e-mail address you can feel free to give it. At least, they are if I've set this post up right.

(And, still, anything I'd have posted to lj before I'm going to be crossposting now, so those of you without DW aren't going to lose anything... But I am posting there reasonably frequently [though I believe there's RSS feeds of DW stuff, so if you just want to read me and comment via OpenID/Anonymous comments you should be able to without a DW account])

I'm shifting my primary blog to dreamwidth, was going to say this after it went from closed to open beta, but, ah well.

Now, this isn't to say that I'll stop posting to lj, I have every intention of making just as many lj posts as I have been doing recently, which is to say, the 2-3 per year from me that you guys are liable to be used to. Meanwhile I seem to actually be using dreamwidth semi-regularly for blog posts, so... (Basically - any dreamwidth post that I'd have bothered making as an lj post will be crossposted, and I'll be sticking around lj to use as I've been using for the past couple of years, mainly to read other people's blogs, so...

I'm at http://gizensha.dreamwidth.org - If you want to read my far more frequent dw posts but don't have a dreamwidth account (which, due to closed beta, I'm guessing most of you won't), there is an rss and atom feed of my dreamwidth posts which you can get at from the site. If you want to comment, you can do so via openid.

Why isn't this crossposted from dreamwidth? Because announcing that I'm on dreamwidth on dreamwidth would seem somewhat... Overly surreal. I'm guessing all future posts to lj from me will be, though (though, as I indicated earlier, not all dw posts will be crossposted, just the stuff I'd be posting to lj anyway.)

In April 1999, a man called Jason Ross started writing a pokemon parody called pokebattles. It evolved into a decent sized community with many, many being written in this format. I discovered it late 2000, and in early 2001 it became the first internet community I was really a part of (Unless you count yahoo chatrooms, which oh god I don't). I also wrote a couple of battles for my own version.

Anyway, for its tenth aniversary, there's been a bit of a revival of it. It's pretty funny, so I do suggest you check it out if you're interested in reading a pokemon parody. And that goes double if you used to read it :)

Relevent links

Pokebattles.com - A central hub, containing a couple of battles and a link to the current forum, as well as archived stuff.Forum - The current forumRed - The original pb site, which contains a new Red battle.Sandy - Umm... The new battles I've been writing for about a month now...

...AKA - I'm still alive, despite my posting frequency. Trying to get this dissertation that's due in in about two weeks finished, but alive.

I still have my old default, although I don't expect to use that often anymore, which was taken from a wallpaper drawn for me by raimei some time ago. My new userpic is again taken from a wallpaper (my first new wallpaper since), this time one drawn for me by rkniner. Thanks to both of them :)